I signed up for Twitter a while ago. When I first started I began to follow a woman in my field--someone I had heard of, but had never met. When I saw that 90% of what she tweeted were things like “I’m changing Noah’s diapers” and “I think we’ll eat out tonight,” I was totally turned-off. Most people who have just a passing understanding of this great tool assume that that’s what it’s all about.
Then, about three months ago, my boss was in town for meetings and I saw her furiously engaged with an application that I had never seen before. It turned out that she was using Tweet Deck. I knew that she was an active tweeter, but I didn’t know about the power of using Twitter client software. She came over to my desk, sat down, and downloaded the powerful little ap for me. She then set up some columns--at the time she was actively engaged in promoting #dbw, Digital Book World--and added that and her own feed to my screen. She showed me how to adjust the notification settings and changed my theme to a cool black background. That was a truly transformational moment for me.
Since then, I have garnered 217 followers and am following 580 tweeters. I’m still a babe in the twittersphere, but here’s what I’ve learned so far:
This thing is more powerful than Google. Let’s admit it, most of us use Google in the same way we used AskJeeves.com: we click on a search box and type in our question for whatever it is we’re looking. One of my recent Google searches: Who played bass in Derek & the Dominos? In .02 seconds I had the answer: Carl Radle. But Google cannot tell me that there’s a review in metacritic today about a new box set of the legendary bassist’s recordings (I wish there were!). If I were a regular reader of that site, I would have stumbled on that article on my own. With Twitter, I won’t miss it.
A topic that I am passionately concerned about is the future of the chain bookstore Borders. Because I’m following about 25 people on Twitter that are also highly concerned with the same topic, there is a daily feed of tweets and retweets with links to bleeding-edge articles about the company. In real time, I am able to get news that is not making it onto the Today Show or USA Today, but is most important to me. And even if it were big headline news, Twitter takes me deeper than any of these mainstream outlets can go. When I Googled ‘borders’ I got a listing of Borders locations in my area, a link to their corporate website, and a link to the Wikipedia article on the chain, but nothing on the news breaking on the company’s credit problems. Granted, most of us don’t use Google anymore to find news. If we want news we go to NYTimes.com, MSN.com, etc. Still, if I had used those sites, I would not have been shown links to articles from the UK publishing trade newsletters which I found on Twitter or the fantastic analysis I was directed to in TheAtlantic.com.
Twitter search is not perfect. Typing in ‘borders’ also returned tweets like this: ‘Insanity is not a distinct and separate empire; our ordinary life borders upon it.’ Nevertheless, it is an incredibly efficient means for gathering up-to-the minute news and information.
Twitter is personal
A few years ago, I read an article on-line about ‘mind maps.’ If you’re not familiar with them, they are diagrams of the things that are important to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map
Because there are now so many interesting people using Twitter right now, I am able to follow people that are passionate about the same things I am. If you’re like me, you’re into some pretty off-beat stuff. There’s no one, however, who shares all of my interests. With Twitter, I can get updates from different people on items for everything that is important to me. It’s like having my own personal wire service.
Twitter is great for marketers
If America is a nation of salespeople, then Twitter is the next stage in our evolution. While the ap does have more than its share of annoying telemarketing types who only want to sell you junk, there are oodles of thoughtful people who are willing to share with you everything they know about their professional field. Of course, everyone is out there trying to build his or her ‘personal brand’ (who isn’t?) and more often than not the links shared are less interesting than advertised. Nevertheless, Twitter is a gold mine of interesting, hard-to-find information. Here are a few helpful tidbits that I’ve discovered so far:
http://www.advertisearea.com/blog/2011/01/14/gary-vaynerchuck-reveals-his-online-marketing-secrets/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
(I know, I’m the last person on the planet to hear of Gary Vaynerchuck, but his book, Crush It! really does rock!)
http://mashable.com/2011/01/15/new-social-media-resources-15/
http://tpdsaa.tumblr.com/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704739504576068210683828524.html
To sum up, I highly recommend that you visit www.twitter.com and www.tweetdeck.com, set-up your account, and start discovering news and information about what is most important to you.
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